In today's highly competitive business world, maintaining current customers and obtaining new customers to grow a business are a necessity. Businesses are always looking for ways to increase revenue, and increasing its sales to customers, both current and new, through advertising plays a large part in many business's plans for growth. Advertising has shown to be an effective method to inform, persuade or remind target buyers of the business' goods, services or goodwill, with the ultimate goal being that an advertisement will result in the sale of the goods or services. Studies have confirmed that the more that an advertisement can be made relevant and timely for a particular intended recipient, the more likely that it is to be successful. Location-based service (LBS) providers allow a business to provide a location-based service, e.g., coupon, advertisements, brochures, information, etc., to customers that are both timely and relevant. For example, a smart-phone (or other networked mobile device) user may register with the LBS provider to be provided with a service when the user is in the proximity of a selected business. LBS providers can also assist a business to provide rewards for those customers that patronize the business' location on a frequent basis. When a customer physically visits the business' location and registers his visit using a networked mobile device (often referred to as electronically checking-in, the customer can earn points toward some type of reward, e.g., coupon, special offer, etc.
Geofencing is an important technology for location based service providers. A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for specified geographic location point. When a device with location awareness ability enters or exits a geo-fence, some type of event is triggered to the device, typically via e-mail or text message. Most of the current geofencing solutions utilize a radius around a location point as the virtual perimeter to trigger events. Such radius based solutions (and other similar solutions) are simple and work well for some location based services, such as, for example, proximity marketing, e.g., sending a coupon when the device comes within a one mile radius of a store). However, such radius based solutions do not work well for many services that require high-precision geo-fence solutions. For example, a business may only want to send coupons or offers to a customer once the customer has actually entered the store, or allow a customer to check-in only when they have actually entered the store's property. The radius based geo-fence may either miss the trigger (if the radius is too small) or send a wrong trigger (if the radius is too large).